More Nader

Update: A reader writes, “To win my vote back (I had voted Green in all local races until 2000), the Green Party must recognize that its actions (through the actions of its candidate) in 2000 were wrong.“

Exactly. An apology would have gone a long way.

Another reader writes: “Look, the election should never have been as close as it was. Gore should [have] trounced Bush, no two ways about it. If one assumes that going in, and one wishes to register discontent with the system at large, suddenly it becomes an opprtunity.”

Should have? What does that mean, should have? Nader voters have been hiding behind this excuse for seven years. BUSH WAS AHEAD IN THE POLLS FROM THE SPRING UP UNTIL ELECTION DAY, with the exception of the three weeks following the Democratic convention. The people wanted change. Moreover, it’s highly unusual for Presidents to be succeeded by the sitting Vice President. UNDER THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES, NO REASONABLE PERSON COULD HAVE ASSUMED “GOING IN” THAT GORE WAS GOING TO TROUNCE BUSH, WHEN ONE HONEST LOOK AT THE SITUATION WOULD HAVE REVEALED GORE TO BE BEHIND IN THE POLLS FOR EIGHT OUT OF NINE MONTHS. WHAT KIND OF “OPPORTUNITY” DID THAT PRESENT? One opportunity: To spoil the election.

If you want to see an articulate representation of what I consider to be a completely wrong opinion, check out this. One of the points made is that, contrary to what I indicated yesterday, it was unreasonable for anyone to expect Bush to be as awful as he turned out to be. If so, then I guess I must be the smartest guy going, because I saw this guy coming from miles off and was always amazed by environmentalists like David Brower who were perfectly willing to let Bush get elected, as though that would somehow energize the Green party or the environmental cause. Far from it.

The above writer also whips out the tired notion that Gore should have won his own state. Sure he should have. And he should have been able to campaign in his own state, instead of having to run to Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign in order to counteract that Nader surge.

Now, on to a related point. Twinfan writes that we don’t know what would have happened had Nader not run. Not true. We know EXACTLY what would have happened. Gore would have won the election. First off, he would have gotten the 500 or so of Nader’s 90,000 votes needed to put him over in Florida. But moreover, he would have done better elsewhere as well, BECAUSE HE WOULDN’T HAVE HAD TO RUN TO THE LEFT. Because of Nader, Gore had to run as a populist liberal and somehow tease out this shaky ground between being sort of liberal and too liberal, enough to entice some Nader voters but not enough to turn off moderate voters. He was the true moderate, but he left the middle to Bush, who went around pretending to care about the environment and claiming to be a “compassionate conservative.”

. . . Finally someone writes in with the sentiment, isn’t it the essence of Democracy to vote for who you think is the best candidate? First off, I won’t even get into my wondering how anyone could listen to Nader for two minutes and see a potential president there. But say you admire Nader. That’s fine. But Democracy is about being smart. The religious right, whatever else you want to say about them, they’re very smart. They infiltrated the Republican party, to the extent that ostensibly sane men like Giuliani and McCain have to bend over backwards for them. If the Nader people understood American history and understood the fate of third-party movements, they would have just tried to infiltrate the Democrats. Nader should have run in the primary. He might have been Secretary of the Interior in a Gore administration and advanced his causes from inside the government, rather than as some discredited, despised outsider.